PLAN: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase
funding for Female Genital Cutting education programs to work with existing
local initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Draft as of July 24

Contention 1
A FEMALE GENITAL CUTTING OR FGC AFFECTS MILLIONS OF WOMEN
Ellen Gruenbaum, Professor of Anthropology at California State University at Fresna, 2005, ‘The
Female Circumci&on Controversy: An Anthropological perspective” p. 7-8 [
Various writers estimate that there are more than 100 million women and g altered by some form of female circumci sion. Toubia estimates 114.3 million (1993:25). About 2 million are con sidered at risk for undergoing the procedure each year Some form of
ca cuthp.g is pxaciiced in about twenty-eight countries in
B. FGC REMAINS WIDESPREAD IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
Wairagala Wakabi, research associate with CIPESA (east and southern Africa), March 29, 2007 “Africa baffles to make female genital mutilation history”, [
During the nast 2 years substantial progress has been made in chan attitudes towards fenial genital mutilation in countries such as Guinea, EQvpt, Tanzania! Kenya, and Senegal. But the practice remains widesDread across Africa Wairagata Wakabi reports.
In Guinea where 97% of all women undergo female genital mutilation about 150 communities made a declaration to collectively abandon the practice at the beginning of this year. Attitudes towards the harmful procedure are also changing in other countries in Africa such as Egypt, Tanzania, Kenya, and Senegal But despite this growing momentum against the practice, it is still prevalent in these countries and it remains widespread in at least 28 countries on the continent. Poor education and low levels of income among women in African countries, coupled with inadequate governmental support in efforts to eradicate the practice mean it will take longer to stamp out

Lack of US Government funding prevents FGC programs from working
Emad Mekay, 2-7-04, www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0207-06.htm

There is a spillover; the US has a perogative to act on the issue of FGC
Ellen Gruenbaum, 2005, "The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological perspective" p. 7-8

Contention 2 is the advantages
Advantage 1: Forced FGC is bad
FGC is forced on those who reject it
Irin, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Razor's Edge - The Controvery of Female Genital Mutilation March 05
www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?IndepthId=15&ReportId=62462

B.EVERY YEAR 2 MILLION GIRLS ARE FORCED INTO FCC, BY THE END OF THIS DEBATE
ROUND 342 WOMEN WOULD HAVE BEEN FORCED IN TO FCC.
Dr. Elizabeth Boskey, assistant professor in the Masters of Public Health program at SUNY
Downstate, Apri 1, 2007, “Female Genital Mutilation’,
http://std.about.com/od/stdsinthernedjaJaffpmartjde.htm [
Every year more than 2 million girls and women are forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM). Although the specific rationale behind the practice varies from country to country and culture to culture, the general reason remains the same — to deny women the ability to have pleasurable sexual intercourse and in so doing cause them to reserve their sexuality for their husbands. It may also be a religious rite of initiation into womanhood, a way to cleanse an ugly body part, required by god, or simply a way to increase male pleasure. FGM, also known as genita! cutting or female circumcision, is practiced in more than 30 countries, mostly in a belt stretching across Africa north of the equator.

FGC can lead to a laundry list of health problems both short-term and Long-term, and also sexual, mental, and social
P. Stanly Yoder, Noureddine Abderrahim, and Arlinda Zhuzhuni, Sept 2004, "Female Genital Cutting in the Demographic and Health Surveys: A Critical and Comparative Analysis" p. 22-23

k Uncircumcised girls are shunned
Peter Opiyo, journalist 7-8-07 Kenya: U.S, Kenya Partner to End Female ‘Cut’ AllAfrica.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200707080009. html Bragiel
She says young men are under constant pressure from their parents, peers and the entire community to woo only circumcised girls for marriage. As a result, some girls who had earlier shunned circumcision, are forced to rescind their decisions out of the desire to get married.

Fear forces FGC to remain
Mike Crawley Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor 4-5-05 Africa Spurns Female Circumcision, www.csmonitor.com/2005/0405/p06s01-woaf.html
Excision of all or part of the female sexual organs before puberty has long been considered a prerequisite for marriage among many of the pastoral cultures immediately south of the Sahara and in the Horn of Africa. Despite growing awareness of the health risks, which can affect childbirth, parents continue carrying out the practice because they tear their daughters won’t otherwise be able to find a husband.
It’s this same power of social conformity that is helping the campaign to end FGM in Senegal. As more villages publicly announce that they are abandoning the practice Tostan says others begin realizing it may no longer be a marriage requirement, momentum builds, and the number of villages folIowing suit snowballs
“People are realizing that the social convention is changing,” says Molly Meiching, the Texas- born director of Tostan who has lived in Senegal for more than two decades

FGC is dehumanizing
Thandeka Teyise, writer for www.health-e.org, Jan 14, 2004 "the cruelest cut," www.health-e.org.za/news/article_audio.php?uid=20030914


* DEHUMANIZATION LEADS TO GENOCIDE AND WAR
Dav Berube, professor as the University of South Carolina, 1997 (David, Ph.D. in Communications, ‘ Prolongevity: The Down S!de, Nanolechnology Magazine, June/July 1997, p. 1-6, URL:
httDi/www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/4aculty/berube/proiong.htrn fNithya3
This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matsou’s treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn “ destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, famine. or natural calamity on record — and its potentiaI danger to the Quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse . . . Behind the genocide of the Holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menecide of deviants and dissidents.., in the cuckoo’s next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man.,. (Montagu & Matsou, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impacts dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it.
Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil’s most powerful weapon

Advantage 2: Global Feminist Movement

FGC is designed to subjugate and oppress women
Fiona J Green, 2005, Sexualities Evolution and Gender, August p. 157

Women NEED TO HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAKE MEDICAL CHOICES TO BE AUTONOMOUS
R macklin, Dept of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1996
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9050194&dopt=Citation
Universal ethical principles can be used to analyse probiems in reproductive health. The principle of beneficence obligates people to strive to bring about more beneficial consequences than harmful ones, The principle known as respect for persons presumes that all human beings have dignity and are worthy of respect Showing equal respect for women as persons means recognizing their autonomy and treating them as capable decision-makers and full participants in medical decisions A third leading concern of bioethics is justice, which requires a fair distribution of family planning methods, including access to safe abortbn r cases of contraceptive failure.

Currently, African and Western feminism is divided, especially over the issue of FGC
Rosemaire Skaine, Sociologist 2005, __Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural and Medical Issues__ pp. 98
The issue of FC became part of global debate in the United Nations World Conference on Women in the mid-1980s in Copenhagen. Gosselin wrote that at this conference Western and African feminists were bitterly divided. For author Angela GIlliam the debate epitomized the division in the women's movement "between those who believe that the major struggles for women is increasing their access to, and control over, the world's resources and those who believe that the main issue is access to, and control over orgasms." 28 The debate in Copenhagen gave insight into the division, FGM is a human rights issue that is campaigned against as violence against women. Gosselin said FC is unlike any other gender-specific violence. It may be a global issue but it basically is an African occurrence. Thus, she believes this is why the issue pits the West against Africa.

FGC is a practice of male dominance
Dr. Macey Casebeer, 1999 The mutilation of Female Sex Organs News Troll Inc www.newstrolls.com/news/dev/calgold/092099.htm
There is no medical science behind mutilation of any human body, especially female sex organs. To treat the vulva as a slice of bacon rather than as an integral part of the female anatomy comes directly from Neanderthal thinking. Excuses for body-part mutilation described herein have their origins in ancient nonsensical thoughts—thoughts which today continue to be believed mostly by men in order to continue the practice of exercising dominance and control over women Such obsolete thoughts do nothing more than reflect evil practices--practices having spiritual and aboriginal beginnings

The Patriarchy that is supported by FGC leads to annihilation
Betty Reardon, theorist and designer of pedagogic materials and processes in peace education, 1993, Women and Peace, pp30-31

Contention 3 is Solvency
Educating both males and females is key to solving FGC
The Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project, Feb 1, 2005, "Tanzania: Female Circumcision Fuels Spread of HIV?AIDS in Tanzania"
A survey conducted by the Tanzania Media Women Association found that the sharing of knives of razor blades in the ritual practice of circumcision was greatly responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS among women. Circumcision leaves scars that render the women more vulnerable to men infected with HIV during intercourse. These crime against women can eliminated only through education - of the tanzania women and also the men - by explaining to them the link between circumcision and AIDS. World Prout Assembly says, education is the key to solve many problems around the world. Once the people have education and social consciousness, they will no longer tolerate such practices!

Anti-FGC programs are best done on a local level
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow Brooklyn Journalist Feb 11, 2007, USA: Rites and Wrongs: Is outlawing female genital mutilation enough to stop it from happening here? The Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project
www.fgmnetwork.org/gonews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1171249392&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&

C. THE KEY TO FIGHTiNG FGC IS THROGUM EDUCATION AND LOCAL RIGHTS AGENCIES Mike Crawley Correspondent of The Christian Science Monftor 4-5-05 Africa Spurns Female Circumcision httjx//www.csmonitor.conx - [
Campaigners have tried for decades to bring an end to FGM. But theft tactics of providing alternative employment to the circumoisers, introducing alternative rites of passa for girls, or demandinQ legislation to outlaw the practice have all failed to make a dent: an estimated 2 million girls in about 26 African countries are circumcised every year.
The sea-chanQe in Senegal is being credited to a slow but steady ropram of human rights education that allows villagers to make up their own minds about whether to abandon female circumcision Spearheaded by a local rights agency called Tostan the program’s success is proving so eye-catching that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is endorsing it as a model,
“ Tostan anøroach is working because it’s a holistic approach and it works with communities, says Lalla Toure, UNICEF’s regional adviser for women’s health. “The starting point is not female genital mutilation; ft’s about rights, it’s about health, it’s about development. We think that’s the best approach

D. THE QUICK REJECTION OF FGC IN VILLAGES IS LEADING TO A SNOWBALL OF
REJECTIONS IN OTHERS
Mike Crawley Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor 4-5-05 Africa Spurns Female
Circurncision http://wwwcsmonftor.com/2005/0405ft05s01 - [
Excision of all or part of the female sexual organs before puberty has long been considered a prerequisite for marriage among many of the pastoral cultures immediately south of the Sahara and in the Horn of Africa. Despite growing awareness of the health risks, which can affect childbirth, parents continue carrying out the practice because they tear their daughters won’t otherwise bG able to find a husband.
It’s this same power of social conformity that is heJDing the campaign to end FGM in Senegal As more villages publicly announce that they are abandoning the practice Tostan says others begin realizing ft may no longer be a marriage requirement, momentum builds, and the number of villages following suit snowballs

the plan's operation in tandem with african programs is a culturally relativistic approach and is key to solving FGC
Ellen Gruenbaum, Prof. of Anthro at CSU-Fresno, 2005, "The Female Circumcision Controversy: An anthropological perspective" pp26

THE PLAN’S COLLABORATIVE NATURE HELPS TO BRIDGE THE DIVIDE BETWEEN
WESTERN AND AFRICAN FEMINISTS. FGC A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE THIS LINK
SINCE IT ACTS AS A MIRROR ON WESTERN FEMINISM.
Ange-Marie hANCOCK, assistant professor of political science and African American studies at yale
university, 2005, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist
Discourses edited by Obioma Nnaemeka pp 259

Unisons between African and US Feminists have the ability to combat patriarchy
Efua Dorkenoo, Ghanaian campaigner against FGC, 1994,// Cutting the Rose//, pp 175